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Fun party in Cambridge; useful meetings in London; now back in Glasgow. Oddly, 350 miles doesn’t seem like all that far any more. ‘Only’ six hours on the road. And now… tea, bed, sleep. Ugh.

Sorry I didn’t look you up, Richard – I wasn’t actually in Cambridge all that much.

Following my aside about the difficulties of signing up to one’s local video store, Alan quite rightly points out that the card should be perfectly adequate for security vetting purposes (he works for a defence contractor). Wait a second. Proving one’s residency to Blockbuster is intensely onerous, and the card is evidence that you’ve passed their stringent checks and are indeed who you say you are.

Call David Blunkett – he can save £3.5bn by subcontracting the national ID card scheme to Blockbuster, and people will actually have a reason to support the card, if they can hire videos with the damned thing. Genius!

Meanwhile, I’m in Cambridge for a day or two. Of which more, later.

Somewhere out there is an alternative reality in which I ended up working at Techniquest in 1994, rather than falling accidentally into television. I mention this as mildly relevant background, given that last week I really was working at Techniquest.

With the University of Glamorgan, they run a new(ish) MSc course in Science Communication, quite different in character to the better-known Imperial version. The latter is heavy on the philosophy and journalism, while Techniquest’s focusses on performance, interactives, demonstration lectures, outreach… the practical side of the industry. In my (defunct?) rôle as a producer of children’s science TV, this makes the Techniquest course potentially a rather good source of recruits. Indeed, I’ve already met one such graduate, and she’s working happily at Screenhouse. Back around the time of the BIG Event I’d been trying to work out how to wheedle my way into some sort of involvement, so I was delighted when the course organiser invited me down to bend her students’ ears about writing and performing for TV.

What eventually occurred was a day-long workshop, last week, and… well, I had fun. A heap of it, in fact. As the first such thing I’ve done, I was paranoid about running out of material, the entirely predictable result of which was that it all became rather bludgeoning midway through the afternoon. In retrospect, I’d have focussed solely on the writing aspects, and either not done the presenting end of the process, or spun it into a second day. But I think it went OK.

There were some lovely ‘penny dropping’ moments, principally around the notion that, in some circumstances, four seconds of dialogue one way or another can make a significant difference. Also about how easy can be to take something that runs twenty-five seconds, and make it run for twelve. But the impression I came away with was of a bunch of students who really know what they’re doing with props. I’ve seen three-year veterans of make&do shows lay out the stages of a make less proficiently. Very, very impressive. I only wish I had work for a bunch of them.

Some of them were at least competent presenters too, but I was most impressed with the prop-wrangling. It’s hard to teach mechanical sympathy, principally because it’s rather hard to describe it. But this lot were already excellent at it. Bravo!

I moved to Glasgow a year ago, and it’s amazing how long it takes to sort out all the little details. The National Trust, for example, appear to have no concept of people changing address – I suppose ancestral homes didn’t tend to move around much. Those of you who’ve been paying attention will also have realised that I spent six months of this year living back in Leeds, which didn’t help much in the ‘sorting stuff out’ stakes, particularly when it came to British Gas believing that I am, in fact, resident in Glasgow. No wonder they’ve lost a million customers this year, – it took me all year to persuade them that I really should be settling the bill, thanks. I’ll be moving to something sensible[1] just as soon as I can stomach the inevitable farce.

Anyway, since I didn’t have any utility bills until very recently, one of the things I’ve not yet got around to is signing up at the local video store. It appears to be a universal truth, of course, that whereas one’s passport will secure entry to pretty much any country on the planet, the local video shop requires a signed affidavit from the head of state, in addition to the current month’s bills from at least four different utility companies, references from your bank manager and current employer, and the rights to your first-born as collateral in the event of your failing to return, say, a VHS of Crocodile Dundee II.

I now may not bother signing up at all, since Amazon UK have started doing postal DVD hire, with no fixed rental period, for similar sorts of prices. It’s not quite video-on-demand-streaming-download, but given the relatively small latency of first class post it’s not that much different in practice.

[1] So far as I can tell, this is power generated by shoveling avocets into massive furnaces. I’m surprised that this is particularly eco-friendly, but apparently the European Avocet Mountain is vast, and avocets are low in heavy metals and sulphur emissions.

For the benefit of anyone Googling this in the months and years to come, and since The Court Service don’t appear to understand the situation themselves; the Scottish legal system is operated independently of that in England and Wales. Thus, if you’re called for Jury Service in the Crown Court in, say, Bradford, but you’re currently resident in – hypothetically – Glasgow, the Service is not able to transfer your duty to a nearer court. Because – durr – Scotland has Sheriff Courts, not Crown Courts, and juries here are called by the Scottish Court Service.

…which is to say, I got excused.

Strange how the connections drift by; from Slashdot to ComingSoon about Babylon 5, to Shrek 3 being moved to May 2007, to the first details I’ve seen about the forthcoming Wallace & Gromit feature, Tale of the Were Rabbit. Including this delicious brief:

It’s ‘vege-mania’ in Wallace and Gromit’s neighborhood, and our two enterprising chums are cashing in with their humane pest-control outfit, “Anti-Pesto.” With only days to go before the annual Giant Vegetable Competition, business is booming, but Wallace & Gromit are finding out that running a “humane” pest control outfit has its drawbacks as their West Wallaby Street home fills to the brim with captive rabbits.

Note, however, that the next paragraph rather gives the entire plot away, at least apparently. You have been warned.

Outliners have always left me feeling a bit so-so, frankly. They’re fantastic for conceptualising long documents or narrative structures, but most of the rest of the time I’d prefer something two-dimensional (or more…). Unfortunately, the only application that really fits the bill in the latter category, TinderBox, I’ve found clumsy enough that I’ve never quite got my head around it. It’s also a bit too costly for me to want to invest the time learning its ways.

So by and large I’ve stuck with outliners. The one I liked most, back in the System 7 days, was the late lamented InControl. I can’t honestly remember why I liked it so much, excpet it allowed one to attach documents to lines, and have them open with a click. I found this terrifically useful for a couple of projects, not least working on LaTeX documents, but since I haven’t run Classic for… um… about four years, I can’t have used InControl for about as long.

There are, of course, plenty of outliners for Mac OS X. And by ‘plenty,’ I think I mean ‘dozens.’ Some are hugely innovative, attempting to emulate research notebooks and scrapbooks stuffed with clippings and photos and so on. I’ve never got on with them; all I want is a simple outliner that looks nice, has decent search, and allows file linking. So for the last few years I’ve been using OmniOutliner, which was cheap, clean, and unfortunately didn’t do very much. But I like Omni’s approach to their apps – and to user support – so I was reasonably content to give up features. While I’ll usually adopt Vinays ‘If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly’ maxim, in some situations a feature badly implemented is simply an annoying feature, and I’d rather it wasn’t there at all.

I’ve recently been looking at Process, which seems rather dashing and is aimed less at taking research notes and more at ultralight project management. That has its appeal, but… well… it’s just not quite right, somehow. I think because it’s not really aimed at entries longer than one line of text, which isn’t how I usually use outliners. Though I could be wrong – the seven-day demo timeout is a tad onerous, and I can no longer find out.

All hail, therefore, OmniOutliner’s latest incarnation: OmniOutliner 3, and OmniOutliner 3 Pro. I’m hoping this plays out much like the OmniGraffle 3 Pro transition did; that is, I fall instantly head-over-heels for the thing, buy without a second thought, then delight as the subtle problems, lapses and oversights are gradually patched out. A year later I’m still loving the application but hoping against hope that a new version arrives before too long with just a few extra bells and whistles, specifically… you get the idea.

It’s hard to say just what’s so right about Omni’s stuff, but theirs really are the best applications I’ve used. OK, so Final Cut Pro and Photoshop are pretty darned good too, but Omni’s apps… I think it’s that they marry apparent simplicity and approachability with very subtly hidden power scratching along just beneath the surface. This is why they’re often regarded as the quintessential Mac OS X apps – they’re a perfect fit for the design philosophy of the Mac.

So, anyway, yes: OmniOutliner 3 public beta is out. Have a play.

Curious. One would expect the word ‘moustache’ to crop up slightly more frequently than once in four years, but apparently not: today I typed it in an email, and my Mac dutifully and sternly wiggled a red underline at me. Evidently the American spelling omits the ‘o,’ and I’d not previously had cause to correct Quern’s dictionary. But this does rather beg the question: how is it that I have not written the word for so long? Perhaps I should grow one, to provide ample excuse?

On second thoughts: bad idea.

My apologies for banging on about this all the time, but if the following opening line from The New Yorker’s review of Closer and House of Flying Daggers doesn’t make you at least giggle, then I rest my case:

“The new Mike Nichols film, “Closer,” starts with a man falling in love with Natalie Portman. From this we may assume that the movie is concerned with universal, a-priori truths, although there is a scene in a lap-dancing club when the a-posteriori version comes in handy”

Which do you think is funnier: this spoof about Hollywood movie studios suing Pixar for producing consistently good films, or the fact that in the middle of all this ‘being frantically unemployed,’ as I am, I’ve been called for Jury Service?

Update, ten minutes later: no, actually, this wins. They have to be kidding.